It happened as he was running up the stairs, somewhere between the fifth and sixth floors. He felt supercharged now, a smooth-running gun. This newfound energy was nothing but good, cocaine-good, high-grade, high-test, first-class, prime-rib American good. Young or old, drunk or sober, he’d never felt this good on the best day of his life. Some part of him knew what it meant.

The hospital was coming alive inside him.

This realization paid dividends directly into his bloodstream, running its systems straight to his brain. In a blink he saw its miles of hallways, rooms, doors, and blind windows, every glittering inch like a circuit board he himself had designed. He glimpsed beauty in its complexity, the only true beauty, like a battlefield where countless thousands had given their lives. The immensity of death’s pattern made jewelry of the air, a shimmering web whose residue lingered on his cheeks and forehead like mask after mask after mask.

At the top of the stairs he stopped.

They were all staring at him.

Mike and Sarah and their little boy, Dr. Walker, Jolie, and Frank Snow himself, all were here. Through his shock, some ageless, intuitive part of Calhoun saw them for what they truly were, beings that had preceded humanity in this place, primordial things, beings older than the planet’s own measurement of time. He had interrupted something primal among them and now they gazed down at him from a place he’d never dreamed of, not even when he’d been locked in that room with Snow earlier.

Calhoun took a step forward, unable to look away.

They were playing with something round, and after a moment he realized it was the severed head of one of the policemen. The pale cheeks were wet from a still-bubbling kettle that sat on the floor behind them. One of the eyes had fallen out.

Mike tossed the head and the little boy, Eli, bent over backward on his hands and scuttled after it, mewling like a cat. Turning to Calhoun, Mike opened his mouth as if to speak, but all that came out was a roar, a compendium of humming wires, ventilation fans, and the thump of compressors: the voice of the hospital itself. Somehow what was left of his lips shaped these noises until Calhoun recognized the words clearly enough.

Do we have your keys?

Calhoun’s expression must have been answer enough. The party erupted in silent laughter. It was a fine joke. They were free, and he was trapped, all because he had lost his keys. Calhoun felt his previous strength curdle into a melted Styrofoam cup of self-loathing. He was a drunk, a hopeless walking abortion of a man from whom almost nothing was expected, charged with the most mundane of tasks. Yet he had somehow managed to lose his keys on the one night where having his keys meant everything.

No! Walker took them from me!